Tap the full business value of your data center

Managing energy and operational costs
As enterprise-wide operational expenses have skyrocketed, business executives have turned to their data centers as a viable source of both CapEx and OpEx savings. The key? Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) software. Advanced DCIM tools can cut costs by extending the life of existing data center physical infrastructure, simplifying planning and operational processes, cutting energy across facilities and IT, and enabling proactive monitoring to protect valuable business uptime.

As the all-encompassing “layer” to an integrated data center physical infrastructure, Schneider Electric™ StruxureWare for Data Centers software, for example, can help companies yield a 10 to 20 percent initial CapEx savings. End-to-end visibility allows managers to make informed capacity decisions in order to adjust the existing data center physical infrastructure (DCPI) to support increased IT loads. These adjustments help optimize capital by delaying further CapEx.

Gone are the days of overbuilding upfront to buffer system risks. More power, more cooling, more real estate. This over-provisioning approach resulted in inefficient, costly, and monolithic data centers. Today, DCIM software makes the trite-but-true saying “do more with less” possible.

By turning data points into usable information for executives, facilities, and IT, StruxureWare for Data Centers software helps you optimize servers via retirement or consolidation and, in turn, scale up or down physical infrastructure in direct relation to actual capacity needs—even as they might vary throughout the year as business itself fluctuates. Accordingly, you can optimize resources by reducing reserve power and cooling capacity by 50 to 60 percent, for example.

The DCIM software’s robust visibility ensures that such changes can be made at business speed since you can see your data center equipment and resource availability in relation to the physical infrastructure and respond accordingly. For example, if you have 50 new servers to provision, you can quickly and easily determine whether you have enough space, power, and cooling and, if so, where. Once you figure out rack placement, you then can analyze the new servers’ impact on PUE.

Intelligent energy management
DCIM-enabled analysis is essential for smart energy management, especially since reducing energy use can have noticeable cost-saving benefits. StruxureWare for Data Centers can drill into subsystems (e.g., UPS) to see where energy is being consumed throughout the data center. The software can model systems such as power and cooling to decide where cutbacks are possible without heightening system risks. You can turn this energy insight into energy-related OpEx savings, as well as both enterprise and environmental sustainability.

Handling increasing IT complexity
For data centers to become strategic business assets, they also need to be able to handle increasing IT complexity. Advanced approaches such as consolidation (which leads to higher densities) and virtualization (which produces dynamic hot spots) are making improved control and automation even more critical. As authors Torben Karup Nielsen and Dennis Bouley emphasize in Schneider Electric White Paper “How data center infrastructure management software improves planning and cuts operational costs,” “With the challenges of higher-density computing, dynamic workloads, and the need for more efficient energy consumption, organizations require software that allows them to plan, operate at low cost, and analyze for workflow improvement. Only higher visibility, more control and improved automation can help deliver on the commitment of producing business value.”

Because it integrates with leading virtualization platforms, StruxureWare for Data Centers software gives operators peace of mind in knowing that dynamic loads always will have healthy host servers. If an IT load is at risk, the software can move the load dynamically in relation to available space, power, and cooling.

In the long run, Schneider Electric data center physical infrastructure with integrated StruxureWare for Data Centers software can save companies up to 30 percent in DCPI costs over 10 years through optimized resource and energy management. You now can tap your data center to deliver strategic business value.